HaBO: Hero Spends a Lot of Time Repairing Fences

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This HaBO is from Ally, who is looking for a historical romance with a renovation theme:

I’ve been driving myself crazy trying to remember a book a read in the past 1-4 years.

Hero and Heroine have a marriage of convenience. Soon after their wedding (I can’t remember if the marriage was consummated on the wedding night or not) they arrive at a run-down estate that will be their new home.

I believe their first night there, there is only one bed, so they share it, and this becomes a pattern though–since it’s a marriage of convenience–they don’t have sex. They just keep sleeping together.

The hero meets/befriends a neighbor or tenant who loans him some farm equipment so the hero can start putting in a crop. The neighbor’s wife makes some kind of tea or non-alcoholic drink that the hero really likes. It’s possible the hero has a drinking problem, because he starts drinking this stuff instead of alcohol and, eventually, the heroine talks to the wife about bottling/selling the stuff.

The hero and heroine continue to share a bed, and they want each other, but they both think they’re the only one.

The hero spends a lot of time repairing the stone fences/walls around the estate and gets super hot (the heroine, of course, notices.) But still no sex.

Then, finally, the neighbor lady convinces the heroine that the hero wants her.

I can’t remember more of the overall plot, whether or not he was titled, was it his estate or hers–nothing.

I had it in my head that the neighbor lady/non-alcoholic drink stuff happened in Mary Jo Putney’s THE RAKE, but I just re-read THE RAKE, and it’s not in there. That’s when I started driving myself crazy trying to remember what book that did happen in.

Any renovation romance lovers recognize this one?